Origin Myths of Civilisation

Most of what you will hear and read about the birth of civilisation is just propaganda. I am calling these stories 'origin myths'. This podcast explores these origin myths and explains why they are completely bogus. You will never look at a Discovery Channel doco the same way. 

Transcript

Ch 20: Origin Myths of Civilisation
Terry Leahy 2025

I am calling this chapter ‘Origin myths of civilization’.  When people wonder how class society happened or why civilisation started up, they are usually fed a lot of myths. The basic point of these myths is propaganda for class society. Class society is inevitable. It is a key moment of progress for the human species. These are pseudo explanations as I will show in this chapter. They do not give an adequate explanation of why classless communal societies turned into stratified civilisations. This chapter will concentrate on what is wrong with these explanations and the next chapter will give a more useful account. 

Four common explanations

1. Agriculture, the surplus and specialisation

This is what sociologists have called a ‘functionalist’ explanation. The social arrangement in question — class society — functions for the good of society taken as a whole. The functionalist explanation of civilisation is well known, and most people have heard this at one time or another. It starts off like this. After 190,000 years the human species invented agriculture. Suddenly people were able to produce more food than they could eat. More food than they could get from hunting and gathering. This surplus of food allowed a functional specialisation of tasks. Some of the population did not have to grow food. They could do some other useful task. For example, specialize in making weapons, weaving cloth or whatever. Class society happened when one part of the population specialized in making political decisions. A victory for efficiency because these political specialists could spend whole lives devoted to the skills necessary to organize society. 

2. The conquest of the surplus

A much less benign view of these events starts off with the same initial premise. Agriculture allows a surplus. People are producing more food than they are eating themselves. There is a battle between people to take control of this surplus. The ruling class of the first civilisations are the people who for one reason or another win this battle. They exploit the population at large, appropriate a surplus and use it to feed an army of specialist soldiers. An army that can maintain this arrangement by force. Clearly this is a conflict theory of society. Different groups have different interests. Social arrangements arise out of these conflicts. 

3. Population and social organization

Another functionalist explanation of civilisation concentrates on the issue of population. Agriculture is very productive per hectare compared to hunting and gathering. Because there is more food available, the number of people living in close proximity to each other expands hugely. Ultimately this is because humans are just another animal species. We are primed by evolution to expand our numbers to use all the carrying capacity that a site offers. These large and unprecedented populations require a specialist class of political leaders to organize society. The bottom line is that this elite manages conflict. Something that is more likely and more destructive with all these people living close together. Indeed, this is just another functionalist explanation. The message is that class society functions for the benefit of the whole population. Often this message is backed up by comparing the peace and good order of civilisations to the small wars and raiding parties common in stateless horticultural societies. 

4. Organization and large-scale projects

The last explanation is another variant on the functionalist theme. As population expands, there is a need for agriculture to become more intensive. To grow more food on the same footprint. The ruling class of civilisations starts off as the group that organizes the large-scale agricultural projects necessary to intensify agricultural production. The most obvious example is elaborate systems of irrigation that require water from a river to be streamed out in channels and parcelled out to many small peasant farmers. The ruling class coordinates this action so everyone can get a useful share of the irrigation water. 

Considering these accounts

Not everything is wrong with these accounts. Agriculture is certainly a necessary requirement for any class society to exist. It is also true that the ruling class always controls the agricultural surplus. To that extent, the mechanism that these explanations are talking about is quite real. 

It is also true that ruling classes in different civilisations have organized some amazing projects and been responsible for works of monumental grandeur. Like the pyramids, the Parthenon, the forbidden city of Ancient China, Angkor Wat. Not to mention music and works of literature and the visual arts. Tapestries, grand fabrics. Mathematics, complicated astronomy, calendars. Just to mention a few of the more obvious achievements of class societies. 

At the same time, it is worth examining these explanations of civilisation in more detail. 

Agriculture, the surplus and specialisation

Let us look at the view that agriculture creates a surplus and allows functional specialization. This explanation looks at stateless societies, like hunting and gathering societies. It implies that people in these societies are so preoccupied with sourcing food that there is no extra time to produce anything more. There can be no surplus product because all their time is taken up getting what they need to survive. This is all very misleading. A key work on this topic is Marshall Sahlin’s Stone Age Economics. He looks at both kinds of stateless societies. Hunting and gathering and horticultural. In all cases people are spending as little as three hours a day in the ‘work’ they need to source their food, whether that is hunting, gathering or growing a crop. Somewhat minimal compared to working hours in affluent modernized countries. In other words, if any one of these Indigenous worked for nine hours they could produce their own food and enough for two other people. Freeing up a vast amount of time that could be spent producing something else. So, you could say that there already is a surplus that could have been appropriated by a ruling class. What do they actually do with this surplus? Some of this is spent in elaborate ceremonies that go for days and include music, long poems and songs, dramas, dancing, dressing up, art works. Another way to look at it is to think that they spend their extra time in leisure rather than in crafting material objects. Lying in hammocks, chatting around the fire. ‘Greed’, if we understand that as a drive to acquire and hang on to valuable material objects does not in fact seem to be a human need! In some cases, time is spent producing and distributing non-material gifts. Work that is not part of any necessary subsistence practice. For example, the Kula ring described by Marcel Mauss. Ornaments of long strings of shells would be taken on dangerous canoe voyages between islands and conferred as gifts. Gifts that have a huge amount of status and prestige attached to them.
 
Another thing that is wrong with this explanation of civilisation is that agriculture has been around for a long time. Roughly 10,000 years. In that period, quite a lot of societies adopted agriculture, but very few became class societies, civilisations. Most maintained the low-key communal egalitarianism typical of hunting and gathering. The agricultural surplus did not produce a society of functional specialisations at all. It did not produce a ruling class living off the agricultural surplus. The whole of Melanesia is the most obvious case and one that most people are aware of. Everybody knows that the Melanesians grew crops and lived in relatively egalitarian communities. It is as though this knowledge escapes notice as people are running out the standard line that agriculture led to class society — as though to some inevitable conclusion. Likewise, the largest part of the Americas, north and south. It was only in a few regions that civilisations were established. With the same crops that surrounding tribal people were also using. Pierre Clastres, a French anthropologist, goes so far as to say that Indigenous people of the Amazon had various social mechanisms to help them to avoid ending up with a society of order givers and order takers. Despite the proximity of the class societies of the Incas, the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Cahokia, the rest of the Americas went on with agriculture and were not at all tempted to specialize their society into a ruling class and peasants. 

The notable thing about these horticultural societies was their egalitarian political arrangements. No one could order someone to do anything. For example, if a Melanesian big man wanted to arrange a huge feast and provide pigs, yams, taro and so on, he would walk around his community urging people to help him. Cajoling them, not ordering them. If a native American warrior wanted to organize a war party against a neighbouring tribal community, he would invite other men to join him. Not tell them what to do. In such societies, decisions were made after long discussions involving all members of the community. The role of the chief, if there was one, would be to help the community to reach a consensus. I have discussed the unequal gender order that prevailed in these societies in part B of Riddles of History. At the same time, women had spheres of action in which they made their own decisions. As with the men, they assumed that all were equal parties and that no one could be ordered around. 

This common knowledge of horticultural classless societies is buried, almost like a case of amnesia, when people come to talk about the origins of social class. They just forget it. 

The functional specialization of class societies is always hierarchical and not necessarily efficient in relationship to human needs. The origin myth is that this agricultural surplus was a great boon. Then the ruling class organized it to put people into functional specialisations — to everybody’s benefit. None of this stands up to scrutiny. The functional specializations of civilisations are always parts of a social mechanism designed to extract a surplus and maintain the power of the ruling class. For example, the blacksmiths that provided the army with weapons. The priests that organized the ceremonies that promoted the power and benevolence of the elites. The scribes who recorded payments of tribute or taxes. The surveyors who ensured that land was allocated as the ruling class intended. In so many cases, the functional specialisations of class societies were a deformation of human potential. The people building the Egyptian pyramids ended up with arthritis. The soldiers who drew the English longbows ended up with wrecked shoulders. The peasants of every class society suffered from overwork and malnutrition. Stateless societies did a much better job of making sure that everyone was doing an interesting variety of tasks and living well.

The conquest of the surplus

The second explanation of class, which I want to consider is the conflict theory of the myth of origins. This is the one that comes out of Marxist ideas. According to this view, agriculture creates a surplus. Then there is a battle to take control of this surplus. The ones who win that battle become the ruling class. Class society starts from that point. For example, the Trotskyist theorist, Ernest Mandel gives us that version in an introduction to Marxism. There is truth in a part of this story. The first ruling class is a group that takes control of a surplus made available by agriculture. But what remains mysterious is what makes this competition likely. Why are people competing to grab control of the surplus? This in stateless communal Indigenous societies. There is a cooperative economic system. People join together to produce the food and distribute it to ensure that everyone gets a share. Competition for material wealth in the form of objects does not exist. In so far as there is competitive prestige it is expressed as the distribution of gifts of food or craft goods to the population, not its accumulation. The result is that people’s material possessions are pretty equal. Their housing, weapons, hammocks, baskets. The wooden statues and carvings that depict ancestors, or spirits from the natural world, are housed in communal spaces. There is no social space for the competition to possess a surplus that this origin myth supposes. It would very strange if members of these societies behaved like this. 

The second mystery of this origin myth is why ordinary people in these egalitarian communities might allow themselves to be corralled into the unequal arrangements of class society. When in the first place they are running their daily life, controlling the politics of their group in collective meetings. 

I will return to these questions in the next chapter. 

Population and social organization

Another explanation of class society is that a ruling elite is necessary to prevent conflict when you have large populations living in close proximity. It is agriculture that enables this population density. A class hierarchy, able to keep the peace, becomes necessary for society to function. Going along with this is the argument that stateless societies are very violent. To avoid this violence, humans invented social class along with peace keeping law and order. The evolutionary psychologist, Stephen Pinker, is a strong proponent of this theory. But clearly it goes back to Hobbes and has lots of popular versions. Pinker backs this theory with calculations of the numbers of men killed in tribal violence, per head of population, in Melanesia. Compared to numbers killed in the second world war in Europe. 

There is no simple response to this. I will start with a brief comment. I doubt if this comparison includes the people killed as aspects of political violence or genocide. Going along with class society. Do these figures for the second world war include 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime? What about the purges and famines of the Soviet Union under Stalin or in Mao’s China? What about the Hundred Years war that devastated Europe in the late Middle Ages? This is not to mention the genocides committed by European powers in the colonial period. The massacre of the Hereros in Namibia. The depopulation of Latin America through introduced diseases and genocidal overwork in the gold and silver mines. These are just a few examples. Class society looks peaceful if you focus your attention on periods of stability and look at the core area controlled by the ruling class. But look a bit outside that and the bodies pile up. 

There are in fact systems for mediating conflict in egalitarian, stateless society. Within a village or residential group and between groups. The film ‘Ten Canoes’, about pre-colonial Aboriginal Australia, reconstructs an example of these processes, based on early ethnographic accounts and oral history. A conflict between two local groups ends up with a staged punishment of the wrongdoing party. The associates of the perpetrator and the associates of the victim are from two neighbouring groups. The men of each group stand facing the other group. They throw spears at each other from quite a long distance, until the guilty party has been speared in the leg. That is the resolution of the conflict. This is a form of feud, if you like, but it is massively controlled by rules and regulations that have become culturally accepted as traditional by all parties. In the wars staged between groups that are typical of Melanesian Indigenous society, very few people were in fact killed. At least prior to the introduction of firearms. 

None of this is meant to deny the violence of Indigenous stateless societies. Especially horticultural societies. Warrior prestige was often to be achieved through violence, such as raiding parties organized to attack a distant village. A constant back and forth of alliance and conflict. Despite this, a more balanced perspective would counterpose this to the excesses of class societies outside of their peaceful heartlands. 

I find the main problem with this analysis to be the failure to take into account the other problems of living in a class society. The account supposes that the human species invented class to avoid the dangers of violence we had previously suffered from. But what about the other dangers peculiar to class societies? 

The health consequences of class society have always been disastrous. People from the global North living in the last half a century forget the history of class — and the experiences of the rest of the world. The monocultures typical of class society lead to a shocking diet for peasants. Insufficient protein and other deficiencies are common. In recent years, up to fifty per cent of children under five are stunted from malnutrition in Africa and South Asia. This is completely unlike the situation of stateless people, living in very lightly populated landscapes. Eating a great variety of animals along with a huge suite of domesticated and wild plant species. Plagues and famines are the common experience of class societies. The first because of the density of urban populations. Cities so toxic that they were not able to maintain their populations — without continuing to draw from the surrounding countryside. Famines because monocultures made the food supply very vulnerable to pests, diseases and climate variations. I will come back to these issues.

An obvious downside to class society is what Marx called ‘alienated’ labour. This is work where the worker has no control over the work, the conditions of work or the distribution of the product. Almost all people in class societies are in that situation. They are doing what they are told to do. Ordered around in their daily life by a brutal military dictatorship. Do this or suffer the consequences. These conditions never applied to stateless societies. The day’s working tasks were organized by those doing the work and the products were theirs to distribute. Whether through customary expectations about who the recipients in the community should be, as kin. Or for their own use. The idea that people might choose class society to avoid the danger of random violence in a stateless society is hard to square with the dire consequences in daily alienation. Particularly in so far as men in stateless horticultural societies seem to have embraced this violence as high status and exciting. Despite the risks.

Going along with this alienation is the stigma that goes with subordination in class societies. Disgusting, stupid, lazy are common sentiments expressed in the dominant media of class societies. Barely better than animals. The ruling class are the ones permitted to wear fine fabrics and use extravagant luxurious items, to express themselves in works of art and religious imagery, to stand at the front in ceremonies for the whole population. Again, it seems unlikely that the mass of ordinary people in stateless societies chose this fate to ensure a peaceful life. 

A second aspect of this functionalist argument is that large dense populations required hierarchical organisation to manage conflict. The argument assumes that agriculture produces a galloping increase in population. This is not the case. What Marshall Sahlin’s book also demonstrates is the stable low-density populations typical of stateless societies. Humans certainly increased population to occupy every liveable niche on the planet. But stateless societies are low in density. Meaning that whether they have agriculture or not, the residential group occupies only a small portion of the land area they need for their own subsistence. Most of the land that they theoretically occupy, their territory, is left idle most of the time. The effect is that even in the most unlikely climatic variations, they can survive on the land to which they have access. How did they achieve this population stability? A number of factors. Possibly herbal measures to control conception or abort. Infanticide in some cases. The common practice of wet-nursing for at least four years, making conception unlikely. By contrast, it is class society that makes population growth likely. Because the ruling class wants more peasants to extract more surplus. They want more surplus to expand their army to fend off other states. From the perspective of peasants. Class society divides the population up into separate and competing household units. Parents want more children to help them increase their crops, to manage the tribute, to look after them in their old age, to be sure of having some children survive the dangers of class society, the famines and plagues. It is not agriculture that leads to a problem of population density, but class society, maximizing population and centralizing it to enable political control. 

Organisation and large-scale projects

The next explanation is that class is efficient because it allows the organization of large-scale agricultural projects. For example, huge irrigation works, terracing to grow crops on slopes. To begin with, there is no basic human need to grow crops with these hyper efficient agricultural mega projects. With low population density, horticultural societies achieved a very satisfactory subsistence using swidden agriculture. Moving villages when the soil was exhausted and coming back decades later. To take advantage of the rich humus and soil fertility coming out of the earlier occupation of the site. 
 
It seems likely, given the archaeological evidence, that irrigation centres got started up to take advantage of a particular agricultural niche without the supposed benefits of organisation by a ruling class. For example, in ancient Egypt before the Pharaohs took over. In ancient Peru before the Incas established their rule. These irrigation works must have been organized efficiently by the farmers themselves, not by a ruling class. This makes sense when we also see that some irrigation works of class societies were largely organized by local and somewhat democratic organisations of farmers. The ‘subak’ system of allocating water and creating and repairing irrigation channels in Bali is one example that has been studied comprehensively. At the same time, a ruling class was extracting a surplus of rice from these same peasant farmers. 

As the next chapter will suggest, it is class society as a machine that found a convenient location in existing irrigated agriculture sites. Not the other way around. 

These paeans to the organisational capacities of class society ignore examples of cooperation from stateless societies. Because these are not usually monumental, they escape notice. Even when the evidence is present in the landscape, they are passed over. For example, the extensive systems of fish traps created with stones in some river mouths in Australia. Other monumental examples come from the builders of the monumental works in stone of Stonehenge and Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. These are both sites where people from far and wide came together to conduct religious rituals with feasting. Another example are the monuments in earth created by the mound builders of the Mississippi basin in the woodlands there. These are great earth mounds shaped to represent animals such as birds. Their overall shape as a sculpture is only visible from the air. Their siting here in the Mississippi woodlands is particularly interesting. They are adjacent to the sites of the Cahokia class society, mentioned above. As that class society collapsed, the descendants created these monuments in earth. Festivals of this kind were not just those memorialized in cooperative constructions in the landscape. For example, the Aborigines of Australia from hundreds of kilometres gathered to hold ceremonies and harvest the bogong moths when they were swarming. Other examples of cooperative organisation include long distance trade routes moving ornamental shells or hallucinogenic drugs across vast distances. An organisational achievement of classless societies was the construction of whole regions of the globe as areas of common cultural practice. For example, in Australia some version of the myth of the Rainbow Serpent is common. Groups that are hundreds of kilometres apart have similar kinship arrangements, linked to stories of Dreamtime ancestors that are animals, plants and features of the landscape. These cultural links are all the effect of complex cooperative arrangements. They are ignored when the focus is on the cooperation organized by the ruling elites of class societies.

The common myth is that civilizations were amazingly productive compared to stateless societies. Civilisations are certainly productive in terms of spectacular wealth and grand creations. Owned by the elite. But they are not productive in terms of human needs, rather the reverse. Because stateless societies controlled population in relation to ecological carrying capacity, there was more than enough food to go around. As well, a nutritious diversity of diet was achieved. For example, the !Kung of the Kalahari desert were eating 85 different kinds of food. By contrast, monocultures in class societies were a poor source of nutrients and very vulnerable to diseases. The Irish, England’s first colonial subjects, were eating mainly potatoes when a blight attacked the crop in the nineteenth century. The population of Ireland plummeted from 8 million to 4 million over a sixty-year period. 

The reality is that class societies are much less healthy for the majority of the population than stateless societies. Most ordinary people suffer from poor health. Children are short, a fifth of the children die between the ages of one and five. People have vitamin deficiency diseases such as rickets or scurvy. For example, archaeological findings in Greece and Turkey show that men were on average five foot ten inches. With class-based societies relying on cereal crops the average height of men in that same area in later centuries was five foot three. For women, five foot six inches and with agriculture and class society, five foot one inches.  
The bottom line is that class societies push the subordinate population to the absolute limit to extract the maximum surplus. In addition, a crop that is easy to supervise, store and quantify is a cereal monoculture. Other agricultural crops to make up a fully nutritious diet were regarded as an optional extra, so long as the peasants could survive and do useful work. Insufficient protein, iron and calcium, to name a few typical issues. People forget how recently this changed in the rich countries. Up to the second world war, the working class of Britain were shorter in stature than the middle class. 

Famines are a typical event in class societies as a monoculture is very vulnerable to a pest attack or to a climatic variation. A complex agriculture relying on a lot of perennial forest plants, as in classless societies, is much less likely to crash, leaving people without a food source. In China between 2019 BC and 1911 AD there were 1,828 famines. So, one every two years on average. In ancient Egypt the average time between famines was seven years. In ancient Rome, there were 35 major famines so there was one every 28 years. In England, between 500 and 1500 there were 95 major famines. One in every ten years. Peter Laslett, a historian of the early capitalist period in Europe looks at France in the seventeenth century. The parish records show births and deaths. In the province he is studying there were famines in 1625, 1648 and 1693. In each of these there was a sudden rise in the number of burials entered in the parish registers. Double or even three times the normal rate of deaths. Contemporary accounts show that the poor were eating grass, and offal left on the town dump. These typical famines of class societies would kill up to a third of the population. Clearly, they are by no means a thing of the past. 

It's worth noting that in all these class societies, the poor nutrition was concentrated in the subordinate class. To take one example from the archaeology of Mycenae, the bronze age civilisation of Greece and Crete prior to the classic period. For example, in 1500 BC. The royal elite were two to three inches taller than the common people and had much better teeth.

In other words, the whole idea that agriculture and its organisation by a ruling class is super-efficient is a total myth. That people would move from classless, stateless societies to agricultural class-based societies — because of the need to secure food supply — cannot be more mistaken. People did not create the state and class to organize an abundant supply of food. 

The organisational capacity of class society is commonly seen as the necessary condition for great works of art. If you watch an archaeological documentary, the voice over will extol the power of the engineering, the skill of the massive architecture, the beauty of the leadlight windows. I am inclined to appreciate these great works, rather than condemn them for their tainted class context. Nevertheless, I will make three points.

1. Indigenous stateless societies also performed great works of art. Given the material constraints of societies that do not collect a surplus and consolidate in the hands of an elite. For example, in pre-colonial Australia, there were ceremonies to celebrate a particular species or a social event such as an initiation. These gathered people from a wide area and lasted for days or weeks. Elaborate designs were cut into the earth to represent the narrative. Participants staged dances with singing and music. Magically beautiful costumes constructed from ochres, pipe clay, and feathers represented actors as spirit beings from the Dreamtime. Song cycles were prodigious feats of memory, being recited for hours at a time. Participants achieved a state of trance and spiritual enlightenment.

2. In many ways, the great works of art of class societies are just propaganda to awe the public. Like the great pyramids of Egypt and the Americas. In other cases, they are performances restricted to an audience in the ruling class. Like the literary and musical traditions of Europe and China. Alongside this ruling class art is a folk tradition adapted to the cycles of the agricultural year. So, in several ways, these great works of art were not ‘for the people’.

3. This view of things can only come from those who occupy a comfortable niche in current global class society. For the mass of the subordinate class these great works must have seemed terrifying, or at the very least remote. Their everyday experience was a life of toil, poor food, disease and constant stigmatizing subordination. It makes no sense to imagine that the participants in stateless societies embraced class society for the sake of organizing great works of art. At the very least, that could only be one part of a total explanation. 

Conclusions

If you watch archaeological documentaries or read one of the numerous popular accounts of the grand sweep of human history, you will inevitably come across one or other of the explanations of class society reviewed in this chapter. As the reader has probably worked out, I see these explanations as propaganda for class society. An explanation for why class society is as necessary today as it ever was. Even more so to organize a complex global economy, a highly specialised technology, a vast global population, dense urban environments and so forth. ‘There is no going back’ is the common refrain of these narratives. In the next chapter, I will give an account of the origins of class that leaves our options much more open. A narrative that fits a lot better with what we do know about the riddles of history!